Remembering Joe Ely: A Texan Country Music Icon's Legacy

Ely was a musicians’ musician — not as much of a household name as he deserved, but respected by an impressive roster of singer-songwriters such as Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty. He first came to the attention of the Clash in about 1977, when his rowdy self-titled debut album was faring better in the UK than across the Atlantic in his native America. The band were particular fans of his rip-snorter Honky Tonky Masquerade, described by Rolling Stone as “the decade’s most sure-footed country-rock collaboration”, and they paid him a visit backstage when he was playing at the Venue club in south London. “They were a scruffy lot,” Ely recalled. “When we first saw them, we didn’t think they were a band. We thought they were probably trying to steal our gear.” After crawling around the London pubs for a few days, Ely and Strummer became firm friends; they discovered they liked the same poets (García Lorca) and the same rockabilly singers (Eddie Cochran and the Everly Brothers) and Ely accompanied the Clash on their first American tour, opening for their 1979 Texas leg. He recalled American audiences throwing cans and trying to cut the microphone cords with knives. One evening Strummer stopped the show and said: “Where we come from, all the kids are poor. They’re broke. There’s people on the dole waiting in line to get a menial job, and here I look out in the parking lot and it’s full of Mercedes-Benzes and y’all are throwing stuff at us.” Ely understood something of being musically misunderstood. In the 1970s, when he formed the alternative country band the Flatlanders, his distinctive blend of Americana, honky-tonk country, blues and rock’n’roll — with Mexican inflections — was commercially unpopular in Texas, though it would probably have swung had they had a hip young audience and a clever record producer in Los Angeles. It was not necessarily that genre-bending wasn’t in fashion: this was the age of Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline and the Rolling Stones’ country-inflected songs such as Wild Horses. The Flatlanders, though seen posthumously as one of the best country bands of the 1970s, were not initially successful. No one would hire them because they did not have a “commercial” sound and their debut album All American Music was a flop, though its late release in Britain as One Road More (1980) fared far better and helped to kickstart the “alternative country” genre. Ely had always been restless and the band’s split took him back to the vagabond lifestyle he so craved. In the spring of 1974 he joined a circus, where he was put in charge of the llamas and the World’s Smallest Horse. When the horse kicked him in the ribs and knocked him out, Ely returned to Lubbock in northwest Texas — famed as the birthplace of Buddy Holly — and decided to make a go of a solo career, fleshing out songs he had scribbled on napkins. His country hits, though critically acclaimed, were out of step with the dance and mainstream rock numbers of the late 1970s and his creations found more of an audience in a Britain that was in the throes of a punk explosion. London was calling. Earle Rewell Ely, known as Joe, was born in 1947 in Amarillo, Texas, later moving to Lubbock, a conservative, deeply religious town known for its flat, windswept plains. His father, Earl, worked, like his own father, for the railways; in Lubbock he ran a used-clothing store. When Joe was 13 his father died and his mother was institutionalised shortly after. They lost the store and Joe was sent to live with relatives, helping to bring money in as a dishwasher and cook at a local greasy spoon called the Chicken Box. Music was always an antidote. Ely sang in the First Baptist church choir, played violin from age eight, then sold his violin to buy an electric guitar. Eventually expelled from Monterey High school for singing Cherry Pie by Marvin & Johnny in the middle of a school assembly, Ely took to the open roads like his heroes Jack Kerouac and Woody Guthrie. There was a drugs bust in Texas involving magic mushrooms, a trip to California where he bought a guitar from a junkie and a job as a janitor in a New York theatre. City life was not to his taste and Ely returned to Lubbock, starting the Flatlanders in 1970 in the basement of a house they were sharing. “We never had any money, but we never needed any,” he recalled. “Everybody always had just enough for a bag of rice or a couple of potatoes.” Out of the three members of the band, the others being Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock, Ely was the youngest and the most elusive. Cynthia Spanhel, one of the women who frequented the scene, recalled: “Joe always seemed a little unapproachable. His emotional life was worked out through his music.” On stage it was a different matter. “Joe is completely restless,” recalled the singer-songwriter Terry Allen. “It’s almost like the stage is kind of a cage for him. Normally, he would be out going a hundred miles an hour in a car, or going from one pool hall to another. Somehow on stage, that energy is confined and it comes out in that music.” By the early 1980s Ely had garnered enough attention on the circuit to be touring with the Kinks, the Rolling Stones and Springsteen, who inducted Ely into the American Music Honors last year, declaring: “Thank God he wasn’t born in New Jersey. I would have had a lot more of my work cut out for me.” The Boss became a good friend and also appeared on Ely’s albums Letter to Laredo (1995) and more recently Driven to Drive (2024). In the 1990s the Flatlanders reunited for several concerts and were invited to write a song for the soundtrack to the 1998 western The Horse Whisperer starring Robert Redford. Ely is survived by his wife, Sharon Thompson, and their daughter, Marie Elena. Most of his final albums, though inspired by recent events such as the pandemic (Love in the Midst of Mayhem, 2020), were infused with a childhood spent on the dusty plains of Texas. “There is this empty desolation that I could fill if I picked up my pen and wrote, or picked up a guitar and played,” said Ely. “Anybody that ever came from there knows that feeling; that big ol’ sky and that lunatic desolation; what the wind does to you, the way it rubs the tree branch against the screen all night long. You dealt with it in whatever way you could.”